Once, one of the electronics magazines to which he subscribed had published a joke circuit which
was guaranteed not to work. At last, they'd said in an amusing way, here's something all you ham-fisted
hams out there can build in the certain knowledge that if it does nothing, it's working. It had diodes the
wrong way round, transistors upside down, and a flat battery. Newt had built it, and it picked up Radio
Moscow. He'd written them a letter of complaint, but they never replied.

The above quote describes someone a character in a novel who has a unique gift (or lack thereof) when it comes to dealing with technology.  Rereading the passage made me wonder about this sort of thing in the context of wizardry.

Hexing breaks technology.  That is to say, successfully hexed technology can fail in a number of ways, but the only guarantee you have is that the technology will stop working as intended.

So, what happens when you hex technology that was made to not do anything?  It can't just keep not doing anything; if hexing worked like that, you'd see a lot more things like hexing a gun drop the maximum range of the fired bullets by 10%.  The way hexing works is to change machinery so that it no longer works as it was made to work.  So, presumably, an enterprising wizard could build a computer by meticulously collecting computer parts that were engineered not to work, rigging them to fit together incorrectly, and then hexing it until you managed to randomly tune its nonfunctional state to "Work as intended (mostly)" and deal with the side effects.

The real danger of doing this sort of thing would be that you'd have only the vaguest idea what kind of broken state nonfunctional technology would end up in, since hexing it would also change it every time.  Worse, while accidental hexing puts ordinary machines into a generally predictable state (not doing much of anything), hex-enabled technology could fire up at completely random times.  Still, if you're the kind of wizard with big, big books on underlying theory and stubbornly maintain that the universe is rational and understandable, you might have a big-ass hex-enabled gun loaded with an bullet that can't fire as an emergency measure.

Dresden Files repeatedly stresses that things like Lawbreaker, Sponsored magic, and oaths upon your power are serious deals, that affect you spiritually.  They are not matters of morals or ethics; they are the way the universe works.  But this also makes them eminently impeachable.  If it is a law of morality that it is wrong to kill with magic, then not even the word of the Almighty can make it otherwise.  But if it's a law of reality?  Magic, technology, hell, even Stunts, Fate points, and good luck on the Fudge dice can interfere with reality.

So, take the disease metaphor of Lawbreaking.  Performing certain actions can afflict your very soul, and if left untreated, can grow, spread, and metastasize until they have taken over your very being.  Well, there is a treatment for things like that in the physical world.  If a part of your body has grown sick and gangrenous, you clamp it, cut it off, and seal the wound.  What if you could do that to your soul, as well?

Spiritual amputation was introduced to wizards by a particularly pernicious Outsider.  Learning the ritual to perform it is almost always enough to rack up Lawbreaker(Seventh)[-1]; performing it counts as egregious or repeated violations automatically, and pushes you to [-2].

The ritual adds a Maimed Soul (Law of Magic)[-2] Stunt to the mortal spellcaster it is performed on.  This stunt replaces the relevant Lawbreaker stunt (if it exists).  This Stunt functions identically to the Lawbreaker[-2] Stunt; with the following exceptions:

*The bonus is extended by an additional +1 to all relevant rolls to break the law.
The natural inclination of the character to avoid depravity has been stripped away, with either crude brutality or cold precision.  The barrier within the character that is weakened by depravity is now gone entirely.

*The character cannot spend Fate points to improve or reroll actions taken that benefit from the bonus.  Your soul has been sufficiently violated that it cannot lend strength to your sins.

*Lawbreaking of the specified type no longer twists your aspects; however, all aspects that were previously tainted are now tainted with Spiritual Amputation.  For example, a character with the Aspect I MAKE THE HARD CHOICES performs murder with their magic, and has the aspect tainted into I MAKE THE HARD CHOICES, I METE OUT THE HARD CONSEQUENCES.  Maimed Soul (First) might distort this aspect into I SEE NOW THAT THERE WAS NEVER A CHOICE.

Any character with a Maimed Soul stunt is, spiritually-speaking, an impossibility, an abomination, and a gap in the proper workings of the universe.  The character's defenses all suffer Catches identically to Outsiders; in addition, any effects that specifically target Outsiders have equal effects on such characters.

Finally, characters can use this practice to escape debts and bargains.  A character can gain a Maimed Soul (Oathkeeping)[-2] stunt that protects from the consequences of any broken magical oath they might make, but also prevents them from swearing any other binding magical oaths, as well as releasing any creatures with oaths to the caster.  This can also be used to erase both Sponsored Magic stunts and Sponsor Debt.

Finally, any two Maimed Soul stunts decrease the Refresh cost of all Maimed Soul stunts by one; a further two stunts (for a total of -6 of Maimed Soul stunts) reduces the cost by a further 1, to zero.  A character so spiritually crippled no longer has enough soul to be meaningfully effected by further loss.

I haven't come up with the specifics of the ritual yet, but I'm assuming it's going to be one of those "Round up a room full of people and sacrifice them all to gain the requisite number of shifts" deals.

Thoughts? 

Just a thought:

Fey creatures cannot break their word.  Not, I point out, they cannot choose to break their word, but they can't do it.  Presumably, this means that if you force a fey creature into a bargain it can't fulfill, it becomes something other than itself, and definitely not fey (presumably, a dead fey).

Let's say that the only circumstances that would result in J. Random Mortal managing to talk a fey noble into an insolvable bargain are a +4 / -4 shift on the fudge dice.  That will happen 0.01% of the time, or once out of every 10,000 encounters.

Now, let's say that on average, one person a year is insane enough to throw down with a noble fey.  That means that you'd expect fey to last, on average, about ten thousand years.

Is there anything backing me up on this?  We know that there are powerful, powerful fey who don't seem to want much to do with humanity; might this be because they are very aware that mortals might just invent Lojban and start a conversation with them in it?